E-Passport In the Works

ExE122 writes "In an attempt to curb falsification of passports, the United States has placed an order for millions of embedded ID chips. 'The chips carry an encrypted digital photograph of the passport holder. The chip is designed to be read by a special device that will be used by U.S. government workers who check passports when travelers come through border crossings. The State Department began issuing what are being called e-passports to tourists last week and will gradually increase production. State Department spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus said existing passports will remain valid until they expire but, eventually, all U.S. passports — about 13 million will be issued in 2006 — will contain such chips.'"

Comments

WHY?

[rkhalloran]

A 'chipped' passport would be susceptible to drive-by scanning, adds nothing a mag-stripe couldn't, and will likely be more expensive to implement. What's the point?

Re:WHY?

[gEvil (beta)]

It's all about appearances. Nothing more, nothing less. If the general population thinks that high-tech passports are more secure, then high-tech passports are what they general population will get.

Re:WHY?

[Red Flayer]

A 'chipped' passport would be susceptible to drive-by scanning, adds nothing a mag-stripe couldn't, and will likely be more expensive to implement. What's the point?

The same reason we can't take bottled water on an airplane -- pandering to gullible voters.

Re:WHY?

[eno2001]

Because... some stupid fucking PHB somewhere heard that RFID is the "next big thing (TM)" and just had to have it before those damn Canadians do. I honestly think that's all it comes down to. Someone thinks RFID sounds cooler than 70s mag stripe technology. If you ask me it's fucking stupid. Of course what do I know, I hate the direction the United states has taken the past six years. I'm fucking trapped here though because I can't just afford to pick up and leave. Have to make the best of in these hard times.

Re:WHY?

[amliebsch]

If the chip only carries an encrypted photo of myself, then thieves can't steal any information that they couldn't get by looking in my general direction. But it does make the passport much more difficult to forge, and more difficult to use fraudulently. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

encrypted?

[Lord Ender]

When they say "encrypted," do they actually mean digitally signed? Being able to provide a digitally signed (by a government key) passport photo in a machine-readable form would be good for security.

But simply encrypting the message with a symmetric key (as seems indicated by the blurb) would be bad for security, because many people would have the key, and so it would provide a false sense of security.

The Main Reason is it's Faster

[mpapet]

Forget about the so-called security. It's "secure" to the vast majority of voters.

The objective is to be able to process more people through customs faster and with more data captured as they get off ever-bigger airplanes.

This doesn't address a control point failure (customs) which is inevitable, but it looks good on paper and sounds really good.

FYI: Yes it's possible to store a picture and a fingerprint template on the contactless modules in question, but more likely it's storing a hash that looks the data up in a DB. Sending a picture file or a fingerprint template across the reader would be pretty slow.

Re:Americans traveling to other countries.

[Maximilio]

Americans can arrange their vacation vs. work time quite easily. As a nation, though, our cultural habits come down to preferring about 2 weeks per year.

"Prefer?" I prefer quite a bit more time off. I would imagine most people do. The problem is, U.S. corporate behavior is geared toward maximizing profits at the expense of the employees and an imaginary work ethic that drives people into the ground and causes them to change jobs on an average of every two or three years and careers on an average of every 10 or 15 years. You ask, stupidly, who pays for Europeans' 6 weeks holiday -- obviously as a cultural norm the employer shells it out. It's a quality of life issue.

But please, don't insinuate that just because you're a driven workaholic with nothing better to do that the rest of us would 'prefer' that lifestyle. I think, given 6 weeks of guilt-free holiday, most Americans would take it gladly.

Re:I don't see the problem here...

[lawpoop]

I agree that we need to continue to constantly increase our security measures, but I believe there is a danger in supposed security measures which actually *don't* increase security. It causes the users of such measure to relax their guard, assuming that they are safe when they actually may not be.

As far as anti-counterfeiting measures, the 9/11 terrorists had valid passports and IDs, so how exactly would this prevent terrorism? If an immigration official lets his guard down because a person has an RFID passport, he may be ignoring other tip-offs that would alert him to suspicious activity. This would probably only really effect illegal immigration.

Again, no one is saying that we shouldn't increase security measures. But let's not claim that this is a panacea, or going to do something that is actually can't. Americans seem to have the belief that some simple technology will solve any problem we encounter. The reality is that we have to hire and train competent personnel in immigration and security. Mass surveillance, face recognition, gait recognition, etc. will not keep us safe from terrorism; motivated terrorists will always outsmart the machine or system. What we need is human intelligence, building contacts and infiltrating groups. These sorts of technological fixes are just to pacify jittery Americans into thinking that something is being done.